Susan Granger’s review of “The Frogs” (Vivian Beaumont Theater – July-Aug., 2004)
Back in 1974, I saw “The Frogs” performed at the Yale University pool. While teaching there, Burt Shevelove wrote his irreverent, free-wheeling adaptation to which Stephen Sondheim contributed six songs, including the title number that inspired a water ballet. Back then, Meryl Streep, Sigourney Weaver and Christopher Durang – as Yale grad students – were in the chorus.
It’s 30 years later on a dry stage and, while Aristophanes “The Frogs” is still croaking exuberantly, it hasn’t improved with age. This time, the ancient Greek satire stars Nathan Lane as Dionysos, the god of wine and drama. He journeys down the River Styx to Hades to get at great playwright in hopes that a play with big ideas might set a moral example and illuminate our muddled world, one where corrupt and inarticulate leaders have entered “a war we shouldn’t even be in”. This leads to a debate between George Bernard Shaw (Daniel Davis) and William Shakespeare (Michael Silbery) with Dionysos as judge as to whom is the greater playwright.
As a comic Dionysos, Nathan Lane as no comic peer but, as a co-writer, he’s saddled with a soggy story that becomes an anti-Bush allegory. Roger Bart, as his slave Xanthias (a last-minute replacement for SNL’s Chris Kattan) suffers the same fate. The only role that succeeds in being truly funny is Pluto, played by Peter Bartlett, particularly when he’s warbling “Hades.”
But even director/choreographer Susan Stroman and costumer William Ivey Long are unable to overcome the confines of the satirical, yet stagnant, contemporary libretto which also traces its demented origins to the Shevelove/Sondheim “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.” Somehow its sophomoric silliness and schtick seems better suited to college audiences.